:Money and the Rise of the Modern Papacy: Financing the Vatican, 1850–1950

Abstract

This book is not an entirely “pioneering study” as the publisher claims; it will nevertheless prove valuable. John F. Pollard is especially strong on Vatican finances during the papacy of Pius XI, the pope who appointed the shrewd, extremely capable Bernardino Nogara as his in-house financial manager. Unfortunately, the author is notably weaker on papal finances during the ensuing papacy of Pius XII, who reigned during World War II and the early Cold War era. Pollard argues that money has made the papacy what it is today. It “democratized” and internationalized the church because it made the Vatican dependent on mass contributions to Peter's Pence. Paradoxically, at the same time money allowed the church to become ever more autocratic and centralized. The nineteenth-century popes, like other European aristocrats, had a difficult time adjusting to an industrial world. Indeed, Pollard notes that at one point Peter's Pence, collected from the poor as well as the not-so-poor, was being used to bail out indigent Roman aristocrats with Vatican connections (p. 62). But in the twentieth century, the papacy achieved solvency. This is the important point, not the old question of “how rich” the pope may or may not be.